It is the tragedy of human
endeavour that it works so often unseen and unguessed.
Arlington said nothing, not from injured pride, but because he was
thinking hard for something to say. Eleanor mistook his silence
for an assumption of tolerant superiority, and her anger prompted
her to a further gibe.
"You had better tell it to Lady Isobel. I've no doubt she would
appreciate it."
Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn coloured collie at a
time when every one else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had
once eaten four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical
Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit.
The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's
poems, but her family denied both stories.
"The rift is widening to an abyss," said Eleanor to her mother
that afternoon.
"I should not tell that to anyone," remarked her mother, after
long reflection.
"Naturally, I should not talk about it very much?" said Eleanor,
"but why shouldn't I mention it to anyone?"
"Because you can't have an abyss in a lute. There isn't room."
Eleanor's outlook on life did not improve as the afternoon wore
on.
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